24 August 2012

Well, the internet is still missing. You know it's bad when you start listening to the daily Quranic reading on the radio, because you have no home internet, which means no podcasts, no NPR streaming, no movies on demand from Netflix. I'm currently reading the biography of Craig Claiborne on my Kindle, having plowed through several other items in my queue. Here's a few things we've been up to in the meantime:

Eating delicious Algerian Ramadan pastries. The white one is called makroud, a soft almond cookie covered in a hard white sugar shell. The round one with the almond in the middle is called driziate, and is really wonderful, you can see a recipe here. I don't know what the other two were called, but we really enjoyed that these pastries, unlike so many other local pastries, were neither too sweet nor overly rose-water scented.

A tart made of caramelized onions, thinly sliced turnips, and scallions.

Making fattoush.

The most simple yet brilliant idea: toss cubed potatoes with harissa, olive oil, and salt. Roast. With our convection setting this is super fast and the potatoes always come out perfectly.